Get Off My Lawn!

Garden 2014

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I haven’t had a post yet about the garden this year, but it’s going as strong as ever. Lots and lots of tomatoes (15 maybe?), as well as kale, swiss chard, strawberries, and two extremely under-performing basil plants.

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There is also some mystery squash / pumpkin / cantaloup / the Audrey II slowly exploding out of / taking over the chard. We didn’t plant it, but it seemed too big and healthy to pull. A little TOO big and healthy at this point, but we might as well see it through.

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In addition to the garden, we added an additional “garden annex” in the parking lot out back. This one is mostly maintained by the kids, who planted everything, keep it watered (more or less), and eat the peas. Evie’s in charge of the pots, and Ollie is in charge of his “box”, which was made by Grandpa Ron as a birthday present.

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Ollie had two specific things he wanted to plant in his box. His “flowers” – bachelor button seeds given by Lisa that he’s been dying to plant for years…

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…and his pumpkin seeds. Last Halloween, Ollie dismantled several pumpkins at school and saved approximately 200 pumpkin seeds in a box for MONTHS. He was so excited to plant them, but I thought there was *no way* that they would grow. Until, sure enough…

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Unfortunately, the strawberries were really popping while we were on vacation, so we mostly missed out on those. However, we did get enough from elsewhere for Sara to can more than 20 pints of strawberry jam. We also did some mulberry jam, so if you were planning on poaching mulberries from around the neighborhood, too late!

With our jam supply secured for the year, we now wait in hopefull anticipation for all of those tomato plants. Next up, salsa!

 

Why am I the one who feels guilty?

/ Shane / 2 Comments

One of the best things about the Honda Fit is that I can park in about 33% more spots than I used to be able to when I had the Malibu. If you live in the suburbs you probably don’t care, but if you live in the city, you can appreciate that this has basically revolutionized my life. This alone was worth the price of a new car.

Often I will be driving through a full parking lot, and I’ll see two hulking SUVs crowded the lines of their respective spots, making the spot in between too narrow for most cars. I squeeze in there and hop out, giving a smile and a wave to all the other SUV vultures circling the lot, swearing and shaking their fists at me.

This exact scenario happened at the kids’ school the other day (minus the swearing and fish shaking), and it wasn’t until I was already parked that I realized it was a “fuel efficient vehicle” spot. I actually felt guilty for a minute, and went to back out of the spot. Then I had a moment of clarity.

Here I am parking my tiny subcompact in the shadow of these monster trucks, and I feel guilty because I don’t have a “hybrid” sticker on the back? Even with the hybridization, I get better fuel economy than they do. When we bought the Fit, we made a conscious decision to buy a car that most people said we could never fit in. All the guy with the hybrid Porsche SUV did was pay extra money. Which one of us is sacrificing more for Mother Earth? And yet, I bet he didn’t worry about taking the “fuel efficient vehicle” spot.

I understand that not everybody can get a subcompact (although I still argue a lot more could then would admit it). The most efficient vehicle is the one that is as small as possible to do the job that it needs to do. A 15 passenger van is more efficient than driving the family in 3 separate cars. But how to label the parking spots in a way that’s fair? MPG per person? A 20 page explanation on who qualifies in which situations stapled to the sign? I don’t know.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep parking in the “fuel efficient vehicle” spot. Guilt free.

Haven Re-opened

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Ahh, that time of the year again.

I start every post-Haven blog post with essentially the same idea: boy, I really love being up there. It’s true though; it’s something that I have to relearn each time we go. When I’m there I feel refreshed. Even though I know it will be enjoyable in my head, I only know it in my bones when I’m sitting on the sand, listening to the wind through the trees, smelling the pines.

I’ve been so disappointed that we didn’t get up to the Haven very much last summer, and I’m trying to make sure we do a better job this year. Not only is it enjoyable, but it recharges me in a way that nothing else really does, and I think the more time I spend there, the happier I’ll be.

And all this despite the fact that it rained all night and I almost knocked myself unconscious with tree limbs not once, but TWICE (to be fair, only one actually hit me in the head. *I* hit the other one with my head while fleeing from a third tree limb).

After last year, we were extremely nervous that the Haven would be under water again. The first year it was dry and wonderful, the second year was underwater, awful, and filled with ravenous mosquitoes, so this year is best two out of three. So far, it seems dry and mosquitoes weren’t really an issue at all.

It rained all night, but it wasn’t windy, and we all kept dry. In the morning we went out to eat and it was sunny by the time we got back. Everything was dry by the time we packed up, so no complaints on that front either. About the only real problem we had was that the air mattress leaked all night and we ended up sleeping on the ground. It was pretty uncomfortable; I don’t know how the kids do it!

We weren’t going to be there very long, so our plan was to not do any work and just enjoy it. However, we did decide to go map out the driveway a little bit. A few hours later, Sara and I had cleared out all the underbrush and small trees, and it almost looks like a driveway! We’ll need to chop down quite a few bigger trees of course, but it went from being some kind of pipe dream (“Yeah, we really ought to get around to that sometime”) to something that’s ready to go. I honestly think with a little help we could get it mostly taken care of in a day or two!

So here’s to another year of camping and land barony! And maybe even driveways!

Paralyzed by choice

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I recently was in the market for a new bluetooth headset, so I hit all the usual places: Amazon, CNET, google searches, blog reviews, etc. I was having a really difficult time finding one that I liked. I went through dozens of links, but no matter how many products I reviewed, there never seemed to be a clear-cut winner. This one has better sound quality, but this one fits better. This one is cheaper, but this one lasts longer. This one has poor customer service, is lacking in volume, and doesn’t even support in-app purchases. WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT IN-APP PURCHASES??

I would see entries with 5000 reviews, 600 of them negative. Of course I discounted the stupid reviews, but even excluding those, there were hundreds of people who had experienced problems with these products. I am not exactly going to be a “power user” of this device, but who wants to drop money on a bluetooth headset only to discover that it’s a piece of junk? Who wants to buy the wrong thing, when a quick stroll through the reviews could have saved them the trouble?

So I hemmed and hawed, and ended up buying nothing. Nothing seemed worth buying. There were just too many negative reviews.

Once upon a time, I used to walk in to Best Buy, see what they had, pick one, and was happy. Without consulting the reviews, the vast majority of my purchases were by and large positive ones. I was ignorant, but happy.

These days I’m just overwhelmed by information. I am a researcher by nature, and when there is information out there for me to find, I hate to not know it. But now there’s so much information out there, I literally can’t know it all. Instead I find myself spending more and more time researching, and less and less time actually enjoying the item.

Forget about impulse buys; I think I can find it cheaper online. Don’t just walk into any old restaurant; it doesn’t have good reviews on Yelp. We have 10 minutes to kill, let me see what the local attractions are.

The thing is, it feels like a good thing. We have more choices, and more information, and that’s better right? Power to the consumer! But increasingly I’m finding that it also comes along with more stress. It used to be, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” I was happy with my purchase because I *didn’t* know I could get it cheaper across town and anyway alpha_dude_777 thought the workmanship was sub-standard. I just had a thing, and it was fine. Now I have to constantly second guess every decision. “Well now, hold on, let’s not be too hasty: let’s just see which option gets more likes on Facebook.”

I have to find a way to shut my brain off. Let sleeping dogs lie. What you don’t know won’t hurt you.

Less information, less choice. Less stress. More happiness.

Garden Defended

/ Shane / Leave a comment

We hadn’t yet got the garden arranged or planted, but we had done some work on it. I had buried the compost we had been dumping on all winter and removed the last of the old kale stalks, so it was more or less ready to go. So, since the weather has finally taken a turn for the better, Sara decided to go get some seeds in the ground.

She called me at work. “Did you rearrange all the bricks from the garden path?” she asked. “Uh, no? Why would I do that?”  I said. “Well I don’t know, but someone took apart our path and rebuilt it in a new pattern.”

It seemed a little too polite for vandalism, so right away we assumed perhaps someone new to the garden had gotten confused and thought they had been assigned our plot. We emailed the garden director, but there was really no way to know who had made the mistake or which plot they had really been assigned.

Anyway, we hoped they hadn’t planted anything in our garden, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. Sara put the path back, flipped the dirt, and planted some seeds.

A few hours later, we got a text from one of our neighbors, and fellow gardener. “Someone is digging up your garden!” Sara immediately ran over there and confronted the lady, averting disaster.

Now, of course it was an honest mistake, but by the time Sara got there she had covered over some of the swiss chard seeds and she had unearthed bucket fulls of our hard-earned compost and was taking them out of the garden. All winter long we have been laboriously schlepping our good kitchen compost over to the garden, braving -30 degree weather to save our slimy decomposing fertilizer.

Apparently, one of our garden neighbors had disdainfully told her, “Oh yeah, they just used this as a dumping ground”. Hello? It’s called compost! What gardener can’t tell the difference between trash and biodegradable worm food? The thing is, our plot is by no means untended. We have a nice path and nice smooth dirt, and a box full of strawberries. Sara had put sticks in to mark the rows of planted seeds. “Oh, I thought maybe my friend had left me some sticks,” she said. “Good thing you got me before I threw out your strawberries!”

Good thing indeed!

Again, it was an honest mistake. I feel bad for the lady; I would be mortified if I had made the same mistake. I can only imagine she will spend the rest of the year hiding under the lettuce whenever she sees us. Maps are difficult to read. I’m just glad our neighbor has our back (and a quick texting finger)!